I have owned an Acer laptop for a little over a year. With Vista installed it runs terribly and when it was still under warranty I notified ACER about the problem. Needless to say, Acer refused to help 100 percent of the time I contacted them. I then when through the Better Business Bureau, the Office of Consumer Affairs, and the FCC. All government offices agreed I had a legitimate claim, but they “claimed” they were powerless to do anything to help make things right except file a complaint on my behalf to ACER.

Your Mom getting support from Dell is great and I wish that Acer would learn that lesson from Dell.

As a side-note, I asked ACER would they support hardware related problems under my warranty if I were to install Linux on the laptop? The moment I asked that simple question I was informed that my warranty was cancelled. They did not asked IF I had installed Linux, they cancelled the warranty because I asked about installing Linux. My subsequent contacts with ACER indicated that my warranty had been cancelled. After a year of fighting with ACER I gave up. ACER is just not worth my time and when I finally get the time I will dump Vista from that laptop.